Someone is in your vacant property

Photograph and film from the street. Do not step onto the property.

Windows, cars, plates, anything that has changed since your last photo. You are starting a timeline and today is the first entry.

Call the police non-emergency line, report a trespass, and get the incident number.

That number is the most valuable thing you will get all week — every lawyer, insurer and officer you speak to afterwards asks for it first. Take the attending officer's name and badge while you are there.

Ask the officer one question and write the answer down word for word: “Are you treating this as criminal trespass, or as a civil matter?”

That sentence is the fork in the road — police or court, weeks or months. Write down exactly what they say, including “I'm not sure”.

If someone produces a lease, photograph every page and say nothing.

Do not argue with it, take it, or destroy it. If it is forged it is the best evidence in your file — and a doorstep argument is what turns “trespass” into “dispute” in an officer's notebook.

Deed, parcel number, tax bill, mortgage statement.

The starting point of every conversation you are about to have, and the half that decides whether anyone acts on the rest.

If the deed is in an LLC or a trust: the operating agreement or trust document, plus the state filing that shows you control it.

The deed says “123 Main LLC”. No public record anywhere in the country says who that is — no state publishes LLC membership. You will be asked to close that gap yourself.

Call your insurer today.

There is very likely a claim here, and policies tend to set a notice deadline measured in days. The item most often missed, because it feels like the least urgent.

Pull the camera footage and back it up now.

Most systems overwrite in one to four weeks. The only item here with a deadline set by a machine that does not care about your situation.

Pull anything dated from before they arrived — photos, permits, invoices, the last lease, the probate file.

Dated proof the building was empty, and not anybody's home. If you have none, start the photographic record today anyway — late beats never.

Utility bills in your name, with the usage history.

You were paying for power in a building you say was empty. The month the usage jumps is a date, and dates are what a timeline is made of.

Write it down and date it: no lease, no rental agreement, no permission to occupy, ever, to anyone.

You will be asked to put your name to this formally, more than once. Write the plain version now, while you still remember who has ever had a key, when, and why.

Bank statements showing no rent was ever received from anyone.

You prove a negative with a complete record that has nothing in it. A partial one proves the opposite of what you wanted.

Do not accept money, and do not negotiate with the occupant directly.

Taking a payment is the fastest way to create the tenancy you are trying to disprove. If cash-for-keys is the right move, a lawyer sets it up — not you, and not on a doorstep.

Keep one dated log: every call, every visit, every officer, every reference number.

Six months from now you will be asked what happened on a Tuesday you cannot remember. This is the document that makes the rest of the folder usable.

Ask for real-property litigation — ejectment — not a landlord-tenant practice.

In many states these are different tracks in different courts, and a firm that does volume evictions may put you on the wrong one. Ask directly: “have you taken out a squatter — not a holdover tenant — and how?”

Bring the folder, incident number on top, and ask three things: which route is this, how long, and do I get my legal fees back?

The answers vary enormously by state and they set your entire budget. Our free calculator gives you the starting point — the route, the court costs and the months, cited to your state's own statute.